Cybersecurity and Its Importance in Schools

Overview

The basic principles of cybersecurity are needed as a constant daily knowledge for school staff and students alike. Cybersecurity is becoming important for schools due to the ever-increasing number of risks, the typology of which is becoming more extensive and diverse. As a rule, the tasks of cybercriminals include stealing private information for its use with mercenary intentions. Every school that does not have some basic online crime prevention parameters in place is exposed to the possibility of hacking and data leakage with unpredictable results. Information stolen by criminals can be used to break into other information databases in order to withdraw money. Another way to use confidential data is blackmail, when representatives of an organization or students and their parents are blackmailed with sensitive information for financial gain.

Potentially, private fee-paying schools may contain the payment information of the parents of students, their bank account addresses. Also, access to information may imply the possibility of using it to manipulate data, the distortion of which also pursues a thirst for profit. Distortion of data can not only deprive the money of their real owners, but also wreak havoc in the school system by seriously sabotaging its work. That is why a cybersecurity specialist is needed in any institution, and they must give basic instructions for protecting themselves on the Internet to students, their parents, and school staff. At the same time, it is necessary to protect not only school general equipment, but also personal devices of students, especially considering that they must be integrated into school educational Web 2.0 resources.

Types of Cybercriminals

Cybercriminals who steal or otherwise exploit other people’s information can be from different demographic groups. Cyber ​​intruders range from online criminals and scammers who aim to profit from any potential internet scam to expert hackers. They differ from ordinary online criminals in their knowledge of program codes that allow them to extract information without deceiving the user, but by hacking the computer system itself. A more local variant of information leakage is also possible, since a school, like any organization, may have a spy insider who steals and redirects confidential information into unscrupulous hands.

Undoubtedly installation of various spyware and unfair use of other people’s information can occur due to the assistance of unsuspecting users. Often, school employees or students themselves can be extremely careless in entering personal data on shared devices, for example, they can save passwords in browsers and personal accounts. This information is thus free to access, and the attacker gets the opportunity to take over the account, personal data, and access to the correspondence of the unlucky user. Finally, among the perpetrators of cyberattacks and data leaks, school students themselves often turn out to be motivated by testing their computer programming skills in extreme conditions. Cybercrime is the result of a combination of these factors, where cybersecurity breaches, employee negligence, and malicious hackers cause widespread disruption to the data systems of individual schools.

Risk Management

Risk management is probably the best way to test the robustness of defense systems against hacker attacks. Critical infrastructure, which includes school cybersecurity, is based on risk management with specific frameworks. Monitoring the changing situation in cyberspace is the basis of the observational process and allows you to identify new risks, for example, those associated with new ways of information regulation. The search for initial internal weaknesses in the existing information system is also very important. For example, the absence of a two-factor authentication parameter in the system can already be characterized as a serious assumption of a cyber threat. The cybersecurity professional must also keep track of all risks associated with software deliveries and software updates, as information technology vulnerabilities can be the most technically problematic to fix. As the most suitable manual for risk management, the publication of the National Institute of Standards, which provides regulatory information for government systems, is valuable (NIST, n.d.). These standards can be applied to the work of any organization, since they include the identification of risks, vulnerabilities and possible consequences with an assessment of damage.

Risk management is also an element of this framework, with the answer following for each individual issue. To mitigate risks, the most successful practices are considered to be the introduction of such restrictions as firewalls, special data encryptors, as well as the installation of special software that monitor